Bank of America
Complaint 302122 Details

Bank of America steals money from every international wire transfer they process for their account holders. The way the scam works is that they do not conduct international wire transfers in dollars. They convert the dollars into the foreign currency at a very unfavorable rate for the account holder, far worse than the normal exchange rate for that day. When the money is received, about 5-7% of the transferred amount remains in Bank of America's pocket because of the below market exchange rate they use. They rely on their account holders to not compare the exchange rate they provide with published rates online, due to the account holders' assumption that this large American corporation would not engage in such bold fraud with impunity. Sadly, that trust is misplaced.

If an account holder coordinates with the wire transfer recipient to determine that a substantial portion of the transferred funds has been embezzled by Bank of America and calls the foreign currency transfer division, they have a scripted answer that the exchange rate you look up online is not the actual exchange rate available to people converting small amounts of currency. This, of course, is a flat out lie. If you look at the exchange rate offered by Western Union, for example, it will correspond exactly to the rate that you find online. If the account holder confronts Bank of America with this information then they change tactics and simply inform the account holder that he agreed to the exchange rate they used and there is nothing he can do about it. Online search reveals they have been engaging in this unethical practice for at least five years.

Obviously, no individual account holder is likely to lose enough money to justify legal action. The only way to confront them is to publicize the unethical practices of Bank of America as much as possible so that their current account holders will not use them to conduct international wire transfers, or will close their accounts entirely and move them to another institution (which is what we intend to do). We are young, successful professionals with three children and I can guarantee that neither we nor any of our children will ever be Bank of America customers again. While we won't ever see the $700 that Bank of America embezzled from our account again, we can at least take comfort in knowing that Bank of America will sustain far more than $700 in lost business profits as a result of their unethical business practices. Hopefully in the future, someone will pursue a class action suit against Bank of America and any other banks that defraud their own account holders in this way.